Book excerpt: A boy is killed on a government minister s orders as part of his mission to clean up the country and others made complicit must explore their consciences; a youth gets ready to play his role in the country s lucrative kidnap business; a sister tries to make peace with the parents of the white American girl her brother has murdered; a gangster makes his posthumous lament. Trinidad in all its social tumult is ever present in these stories, which range across the country s different ethnic communities, across rural and urban settings, from locals and expatriates to the moneyed elite and the poor scrabbling for survival. What ties the collection together is Sharon Millar s achievement of a distinctively personal voice: cool, unsentimental and empathetic. If irony is the only way to inscribe contemporary Trinidad, there is also room for both generous humor and the possibility of redemption."